They hear "gay" casually bandied around as an insult, a synonym for crap or rubbish. They grow up in a society that teaches that settling down with a woman is the natural order of things. That homophobia remains rife among gay men is hardly surprising. But Carr has a point: some anti-camp bashing is driven by the homophobia of gay men. This anti-camp hostility partly comes from a desire to conform to traditional gender roles, which gay men have already subverted whether they want to or not. Graham Norton – another screamingly camp comedian – has said that campness is " a much harder thing to accept than being gay", because it "comes with judgment all round". Despite the widespread myth that campness is affected – that it's all for show – most gay men think camp is deeply unsexy. Gay dating websites abound with profiles specifying "straight-acting men only". It is complicity with oppression, not dissimilar to the woman who suggests wearing a short skirt is asking for a sexual attack. Of course we should see a wider spectrum of gay men – including, say, the beer-swilling, football-obsessed lad alongside the body-pumping Kylie-loving scene queen – but why does that mean discriminating against a funny comedian because he's outrageously camp? What fuelled the backlash was a sense that the likes of Carr invite homophobia with their loud-and-proud campness, and all gay men suffer as a result. But Carr has never claimed to be emblematic of gay men.
![older gay men fucking at campsite older gay men fucking at campsite](https://cdn-grid.fotosearch.com/CSP/CSP990/sex-man-picture__k11544564.jpg)
When gay people appear on TV, it is invariably as one-dimensional, caricatured camp clowns, a kind of gay minstrel show. This is how I could have justified my instinctive flinch.